This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Iran’s dissidents head online but the regime is there, waiting for them

Wary of the impact of the Internet during last year's Arab Spring, Iran's regime has launched a censorship and surveillance crackdown.

Supporters in Montreal demonstrate for the release of Saeed Malekpour. Malekpour, 35, a software engineer from Richmond Hill, Ont., is facing execution in Tehran, in a case that is being watched around the world. (VIRGINIE SALMEN / AFP)

Iran’s Green Revolution geeks are taking their struggle to cyberspace, but the clerical regime’s censors are already there — and gunning for them.

“There is an arms race in cyberspace and it’s caught up with Iran,” says Ron Deibert, who heads University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which monitors the digital media’s intersection with human rights.

“It’s not the only government to increase Internet surveillance and censorship, but it has ambitions to engage in more sophisticated surveillance of network traffic. We can see that the Iranians are developing fine-grained techniques.”

Iran has also stepped up a ground war against its suspected enemies: GTA web designer Saeed Malekpour, along with Internet professionals Vahid Asghari and Ahmad Reza Hasempour, were sentenced to death this month in Iran, as part of a crackdown on people who use cyberspace to spread messages the regime considers subversive.

“What we do know is that Ashghari, Hasempour and Malekpour were all targeted because they were seen as capable of hosting, or assisting with the building of websites,” says the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Article Continued Below

“Iran has a policy of dismantling ‘destructive’ online networks, and the three appear to have been rounded up as part of this crackdown.”

Last week Iran also jammed broadcasts by Qatar-based news channel Al Jazeera, reportedly because it objected to its coverage of the uprising in Syria. The channel said it has “faced sustained interference to our satellite transmissions.”

Deibert said that since the 2009 Green Revolution against widely-disputed election results, boosted by the social media, Iran has stepped up efforts to control communication. Citizen Lab will be publishing a report on its progress this spring.

“It ranges from growing controls on the edges of the network, to nationalizing connectivity,” he said. “Internet cafés are required to do more about registering users, setting up surveillance cameras and pledging not to allow (censorship) circumvention techniques to be used.”

In addition, Iran has developed ways of blocking Internet traffic at sensitive times. “Coming up to the March (parliamentary) elections they will block ports to slow down the Internet, making it more difficult to connect to the outside world.”

An Iran-based pro-regime group known as the Cyber Army has hacked green movement supporters, as well as the Baidu site that operates in China. It has been used as an alternative to Google. The same group took down Twitter last December.

But Iran itself has had serious problems with cyber attacks. In 2010 a malicious software program, Stuxnet, infiltrated the controls of Iran’s nuclear fuel-enrichment plant at Nantaz, setting back its nuclear program.

The “cyber super-weapon” that hit Nantaz was suspected to originate from Israel or America. But some in the West were alarmed at the prospect that criminals or enemy states could get hold of it. Ironically, one could be Iran.

“Iran is very much a target,” says Deibert. “Naturally it’s responding. Part of that is developing within the armed forces the ability to fight and win wars in cyberspace, which is just what other countries are doing.”

Since last year’s Arab Spring — which challenged dictatorial regimes — Iran has been more anxious to crack down on domestic foes by “acquiring technologies that allow them to monitor cell networks and monitor social media,” said Deibert. “Facebook is banned in Iran. The tools for doing this are sophisticated and some come from Western sources.”

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com